Well, as we all seem to be coming to an agreement on the other spy related arguments, I would like to bring this up as highlghted by one of my players.

From the WoK Manual:

3. Spy a player. To do this, you must spy on a player’s province which is a neighbor of the province which has your spies in it. If successful, you will learn what a player has in SOME or ALL of his provinces, with the success rate for each province calculated as follows: ½ of EFF%, plus 3% for each aditioanl spy used.

This is misleading as the chance of being succesful is missed out. As it works in the game engine, there is firstly a chance of success calculated as EFF/2 plus spies/2 then, if this works then the EFF/2 plus 3*spies for each province is invoked.

Clearly we need to make the manual and the game engine match, but how to do it? So, two questions:

Have we nerfed spy player too far? (Remember that it is now the only spy option which requires the operation to be done from a neighbouring province.)

What do I do about the turn? - Change the engine to what the manual says and re-run? Give the player the option of withdrawing that order? Tell the player to lump it?

I have to say that I used spy player quite a lot in the past when you got info on EACH player prov once successful. But his was too strong even with the half of your EFF chance and -6 EFF penalty for failing.

Currently, I stopped using it because the EFF penalty for failing is too big compared to the chance of gathering useful info. Usually, you'd rather spy out 5 key provinces directly rather than risk finding about all of the other empty provinces.

Altohugh spy player isn't as powerful as it used to be it's still good value for your spy. I usually do 3 spy players on the same turn and will get 1 or 2 successful attempts out of it which will show me most provinces. It's especially useful if the other player has a ton of provinces.

"Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by stupidity."

The idea behind the numbers for spy player was that it's a tricky decision between putting lots of spies into one mission (high chance of success on each province, but could fail altogether) or splitting them up into several groups (reduces the per province chance, but much more likely to get some information.)

However the doube chance at failur does seem a bit harsh. How about if on a success you got information about one province for each spy you sent in (randomly chosen). That would keep the value of spying a specific province whilst allowing players who put more spies into the order to reap worthwhile results.

You might pass, you might succeed. Your EFF influences this, the number of spies does too, but only minimally. If you pass then you may pass or succeed for each province individually, the number of spies helps a bit more here.

By my current suggestion it would be:

You might pass, you might succeed. Your EFF influences this, the number of spies can if you like, I hadn't thought that far. If you pass, you get information about one province per spy you sent, guaranteed. These provinces do not repeat, so if you send as many spies as your enemy has provinces you will get the full player data. If you send fewer spies, you will get a random sample of the provinces.

What I meant in the previous post was that since the number of spies used influences the number of provinces you could spy out then the number of spies can influence the 'pass' (marginally, just as now), but shouldn't influence chance of success for each prov.

This would mean that you would need to use a lot more spies to get your info than you do now. Making the option even weaker. Right now you can get a spy info with 1 spy. Failing sucks but at least you've only lost one spy. Now if you want ot spy out 10 provinces you stand to lose 10 spies.

Even more importantly it makes spying out a BIG opponent with 26+ provinces extremely expensive.

I quite like the way spy players works the way it is now. What could be improved is simply percentage an extra spy adds to the chance of success. That percentage right now is way too low, making it so there's no real payout for having multiple spies.

"Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by stupidity."